The vengeance of Rome

"Born in Ukraine on the first day of the century, a Jewish anti-Semite, Pyat careered through three decades like a runaway train. Bisexual, cocaine-loving engineer/inventor/spy, he enthusiastically embraces Fascism. Hero-worshipping Mussolini, he enters the dictator's circle, enjoys a close friendship with Mussolini's wife and is sent by the Duce on a secret mission to Munich, becoming intimate with Ernst Rohm, the homosexual storm-trooper leader. His crucial role in the Nazi Party's struggle for power has him performing perverted sex acts with 'Alf', as the Fuhrer's friends call him." "Pyat's extraordinary luck leaves him after he witnesses Hitler's massacre of Rohm and the SA. At last he is swallowed up in Dachau concentration camp. Thirty years later, having survived the Spanish Civil War, he is living in Portobello Road and telling his tale to a writer called Moorcock."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Science Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.